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For years, people heading west on the waterfront trail had to end their shoreline journey just beyond the arched span of the beautiful Mimico Creek Bridge and continue on busy Lake Shore Blvd. All that changed in 2012, when the new Mimico Waterfront opened, continuing the trail from Humber Bay Park West to Norris Cres.

The linear park was more than 10 years in the making and a joint project of Waterfront Toronto and Toronto and Region Conservation (TRCA). What’s interesting is that entirely new public space was created for it. This stretch of shoreline was previously fronted by private condo and midcentury apartment buildings, built at a time when we didn’t have much desire to preserve public access to a once-dirty lake.

To create the park, a strip of property along the lake was either purchased or expropriated. “We had to acquire the shoreline across the project area in order to extinguish the property owners’ exclusive access to the shore, also referred to as riparian rights,” says Nancy Gaffney, head of Watershed Programs at TRCA. “In some cases it was only 1 metre wide.”

On first discovering the extended path, there’s a sense of revelation: a new part of the city has been opened up, one that’s quite beautiful, along a lagoon-like expanse of water with the sailboats in the Humber Bay Park marinas as backdrop. Small islands and little peninsulas have been created, too, all growing in with trees and shrubs now.

Toronto is not known for its master planning, but has instead been described as an "accidental city." (Andrew Francis Wallace/Toronto Star)

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Toronto is not, historically, a master-planned city; it just kind of happened. That makes it both interesting and frustrating. Robert Fulford described it as an “accidental city” in his 1995 book of the same name, meaning it was never supposed to be Canada’s biggest city and a cultural and financial capital. That was Montreal’s job.

The infrastructure here is forever catching up with the city Toronto has become. That’s true for transit, the electrical grid, and parks too. Parkland might seem further down the list of critical things Toronto needs to prosper, but these spaces that the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted called “the lungs of the city” are directly connected to the quality of the life here.

Toronto has some great parks and parkland, like High Park, a quintessential “lung” if there ever was one, with both manicured and wild parts, with a name that is strangely compelling. But such places aren’t in every neighbourhood.

In Buffalo, Olmsted created the U.S.’s first comprehensively planned municipal park system in 1870 that included small parks near where people lived. Toronto is becoming an increasingly dense place, despite the continued resistance of people in single-family homes with backyards of their own, and for many people here their only backyard is shared and public: a park.

Toronto has made attempts at catching up, of late. Though it’s still in the “dream big” stage, Mayor Tory recently announced the Rail Deck Park initiative, which would cover the active rail corridor west of Spadina Ave. with a new public space, much as Chicago created with Millennium Park over its own rail corridor. It would be a spectacular backyard for the many tens of thousands of people who surround it now, living in towers.

The recently-announced Rail Deck Park initiative, which would cover the active rail corridor west of Spadina Ave. (City of Toronto)

A few blocks east, the city is beginning to look at buying or expropriating a parking lot at 229 Richmond St. W. to create a park for another dense residential neighbourhood, one that grew out of a former industrial zone. Downtown was once rife with such lots, but they’ve been filled thanks to the condo boom, and 229 Richmond is one of the last open spaces left.

The Mimico Waterfront shows what Toronto can do when it wants to find creative ways to fit new parks into the growing city, here extending the pleasant safety of the waterfront trail another 1.1 km. At Norris Cres., cyclists and pedestrians are spit back out onto busy Lake Shore Blvd. W. for a kilometre and a half of precarious riding or walking before the side streets of New Toronto provide refuge.

Perhaps one day, all private shorelines will get a similar public right of way, but those single-family homes along the edge might hold onto their riparian rights fiercely.

Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef

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